Systems and methods herein generally relate to reprographic, publishing, and imaging devices and, more particularly, to a master controller for enabling increased productivity in reprographic, publishing, and imaging systems having multiple finishing devices.
High end reprographic and electronic imaging systems generally include a document handling device, such as an image output terminal (IOT), providing documents to one or more document finishing devices (DFDs), and/or receiving media from one or more external feeding devices (EFDs). In such systems, the IOT generally controls the scheduling and flow of documents to the DFDs and/or EFDs.
Such high-end reprographic and electronic imaging systems generally communicate via an interface such as, for example, a Document Finishing Architecture (DFA). The DFA interface is a high-level set of specifications for implementing hardware and software interconnections between DFA compliant finishing and feeding devices, including DFDs and EFDs, and high-end electronic imaging and reprographic devices. The DFA interface specification is designed to be general enough to accommodate devices with different performance capabilities and specific enough to enable physical interconnection without significant hardware and software changes.
Creation and production of printed documents often involves many production and finishing operations that are highly variable with each job. In general, the various operations can be grouped into three major phases: 1) creation of the document information, including prepress operations that render the document in a form suitable for printing, 2) printing of the information onto some form of media such as paper, and 3) finishing of the selected media into a completed document. These three major phases often have many sub-phases, and the entire process may vary from relatively simple to extremely complex.
Traditionally, in phase 1, when a document is composed, the person doing the composition will create one or more electronic image files that represent the parts of the document to be produced. These electronic image data files may be stored in many different formats by many different document creation and manipulation programs. For instance, for a complex document such as a book that utilizes color printing for book covers and pictorial inserts, any of a variety of Page Description Languages (PDLs), such as Postscript® and Postscript-compatible languages, may be used to render the color images in printable form. Often different components within a document will utilize different PDLs. For instance, the cover may be created by a different work team or upon different equipment than photographic reprints or other internal color components. Each prepress team or prepress device may utilize a PDL optimized for its use. For pages comprised of simple monochrome text, a desktop publishing program may be utilized to render such pages or a simpler word processing language may be utilized. Other prepress formats may be utilized for printing of inserts, dividers, and other possible components internal to the finished document. There also may be included in the assembly/finishing job non-printed components such as, without limitation, plastic separators, previously printed sheets retrieved from inventory, photographically produced sheets, or specialized media such as vinyl disk holders or perfume sample packs.
Following the successful reproduction of one or more documents in this fashion, it is often desirable to perform one or more of a wide variety of post-processing functions on the printed documents. For example, certain applications require the selective addition of color or other enhancements to the printed documents using ink jet annotation or the like, application of magnetic ink character recognition media, job/document serial number and account auditing, insertion of pages into the printed documents, brail embossing, cutting, perforation, slitting, stacking, binding, packaging, envelope stuffing, and/or postage metering. Heretofore, the post-processing functions could be carried out off-line with one or more dedicated post-processing devices. Of course, the off-line devices were specially designed to perform certain specific post-processing functions. As the post-processing requirements became more numerous and more complex, performance of other post-processing functions necessitated the replacement of some or all of these off-line devices in their entirety, including all of the base document handling equipment and other hardware thereof. Other post-processing devices are designed to work in-line with a printing apparatus. Like the off-line devices, these in-line devices have been limited to specific functions, and must be completely replaced in the event an end-user desires to perform different post-processing operations.